Lord of the Rings vs. Star Wars

I. Wizards Needs to Stop Pandering to Marxists

Magic: The Gathering is no stranger to crossovers. Famously, or infamously, they sold a Secret Lair product with mechanically unique cards based on Walking Dead characters. At the time I thought it was a stupid cash grab designed to life money from my wallet with little regard to the health and integrity of Magic. But honestly I think they’ve won me over with their latest crossover product, a Secret Lair Drop titled “Intellectual Titans of the Modern Left”. Specifically meant for Commander, this drop lets you show up with decks built around mechanically unique commanders including Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Žižek, Naomi Klein, and more to be announced. So far, we only have details on one card.

Noam Chomsky (UR)

Legendary Creature — Human Advisor

Whenever Noam Chomsky becomes tapped, draw a card.

Tap an untapped permanent you control: tap or untap another target permanent that wasn’t tapped to activate this ability this turn.

Power / Toughness (1 / 4)

So that’s that. Personally I can’t wait for the Žižek card to be spoiled so I can start building a Sublime Object of Ideology themed deck. These cards will be an amazing way to spice up my EDH nights and let my geek (read: Marxist) flag fly high. It’ll be fun until my opponent shows up with a Ben Shapiro deck from the follow-up Secret Lair Drop, Insufferable Morons of the Modern Right.

II. Today in Real News

So I awoke today to the news that Magic: The Gathering is expanding the crossovers that it has already begun with The Walking Dead Secret Lair that I hated and those Godzilla Ikoria skins that I genuinely enjoyed, but am starting to hate based on the knowledge that they paved the way for new crossovers. A bunch of dope cards with Godzilla & Co. on them are not worth seeing Wizards of the Coast basically tear Magic down from the inside.

The two crossovers actually announced this morning were Warhammer 40K and The Lord of the Rings. I love Lord of the Rings and have vaguely heard of Warhammer 40K, but I’m going to try not to make this about what I like and don’t like. It’s immaterial, I think.

What’s really important is the way in which I see these crossovers as the beginning of the end for Magic: The Gathering. Magic has always been a fairly intense game, reliant on a deep understanding of rules and interactions. It’s playable casually, but also seriously. And where I see WotC going now is the production of a game focused less on gameplay and what products it can license. There are a few reasons this might be bad.

One reason is that WotC might de-prioritize competitive play in favor of just cranking out as many ancillary sets as possible. Will the Lord of the Rings and Warhammer sets be legal in EDH, Modern, Legacy, Vintage? The more cards that get poured into these formats, the more problematic interactions that will arise. Even Wizards’ current Standard offerings are currently so off-the-wall that they necessitate an absurd number of bannings. More sets will only further shake up formats that are supposed to be more stable, unless WotC pulls back on its design philosophy, which is basically “print broken nonsense that sells packs until the packs stop selling, then ban problem cards, rinse, repeat”.

Another reason is that, as The Magic Historian noted on YouTube, these crossovers could have a detrimental effect on MTG lore, pushing Magic‘s story further and further into the background until, like LEGOs, it becomes increasingly difficult to find a product that is not a tie-in to another intellectual property. As someone who enjoys Magic lore, particularly its early era, I want to see Magic develop and continue its own narratives, not simply co-opt others’.

I don’t want to see Magic become a Monopoly-esque game that’s nothing more than a thousand different branded versions of the same thing.

III. Monopoly

One interesting question: will The Lord of the Rings crossover with Magic be based on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films? MTG x TWD seemed to be based on the television series, not on the comic, at least where the art is concerned. This is a minor question, but it is a question. There are narrative differences between the books and films, and even stylistic differences. I’ll be curious to find out.

But truthfully, that curiosity may be purely hypothetical, because I’m not sure I’ll be playing Magic anymore by the time we’ve found out, at least not outside my local play group. I’m not prepared to show up to a Modern or Legacy tournament at my LGS (if that ever happens again) and see my opponent lay down Gollum or Mount Doom. More importantly, I’m not prepared to keep giving my money to a company that has repeatedly shown they are more interested in that money than they are in maintaining the health of the game that means so much to so many people. Most likely when Lord of the Rings comes out, the Gandalf the Grey card will turn out to be irredeemably broken but instead of banning it they’ll ban a long-standing format staple from Scars of Mirrodin, wrecking several other decks in the process, because Gandalf is still selling packs.

And then, eventually, Magic: The Gathering will be Frodo Baggins against Luke Skywalker, Lord of the Rings vs. Star Wars, movie franchise against movie franchise. No one wants to see that, except in free-associative film criticism, and even then, probably no one wants to see that.

This might seem like a nice quick cash grab for Wizards, but it seems like very shallow, short-term thinking that will drive more serious, long-term players away from the game, which will in turn make Wizards even more dependent on the casual, short-term revenue derived from whatever novel property has just been licensed. Suddenly Magic is Monopoly, a game with a thousand variations, and whichever IP crossover catches your fancy sits on your shelf untouched because no one actually plays fucking Monopoly.

Remember, Monopoly is published by Hasbro, which owns Wizards of the Coast.

IV. A New Magic Format

Recently I’ve been toying with a new Magic format. The premise is simple: decks are exactly zero cards, and instead of designing decks, buying cards, and playing games, you just do literally anything else. Read a book. Go for a walk. Get involved in community activism. Write something. This format has no name.